THE LAST NIGHT OF RED BARKER – Written by Jeff Neuman; Directed by Amanda Berg Wilson. Produced by the Catamounts (Presented at the Westminster Grange Hall, 3935 West 73rd Avenue, Westminster) through November 2. Tickets available at thecatamounts/well-attended.com.
Lloyd (Red) Barker was a titular member of the infamous Barker Gang of the 30’s and 40’s Midwest. Titular because he was born into the family of Arrie (Ma) and George Barker, but rarely took an active part in their bank robberies or kidnappings. An early attempt at robbing the mail landed him in Leavenworth for 16 years, a sentence that taught him the error of his early ways and kept him (for the most part) on the straight and narrow after release.
The audience knows this is Red’s last night going into the adventure. Our journey is to find out why. We meet Red (Jason Maxwell) at his last job – as a bartender at the Denargo Grill, probably close to the old Denargo Market in LoDo. It is obvious that he is concerned over the phone calls he keeps getting from his upset wife until his boss Charlie (Sam Gilstrap) puts an end to her disturbance. Even then, Red defends her to Charlie and acknowledges that she has “spells” that he has learned to live with. When Charlie leaves, the Spanish character that symbolizes Dia de Muertos comes calling with her siren song. She leads Red and the audience on a stroll through an adjacent park where scenes from Red’s life are revisited.
At the first stop on our ghostly journey, we meet his younger brother Herman (John Hauser) who is neck-deep in the gang’s work and tries to recruit Red back into the fold. Herman has been deceased since 1927 when he committed suicide to keep from being taken in by the police. We next see an interaction between Red and his cellmate in Leavenworth (Don Randle), a man so desperate for proof that there is a world outside prison that he begs to read Red’s letters from his mother and smells them first, just to remember what outside smelled like. Each stop along the way illustrates another thing that Red has learned.
The third stop gives us a scene between Red who has gotten a job as a guard at the Ameche Internment Camp during WWII and one of his female detainees (Min Kyung Kim). She wants to go outside the gate to get a medicinal plant that would help her father. He stops her but when he hears her story and talks to her about her art, he lets her go. It was such a touching scene that I wanted to tell him that it was a nice thing he did but found that I was so choked up that I couldn’t. We’ve learned along the way that Red has a gentle soul and trying very hard to be a better man.
Inside the Grange Hall, we finally meet Ma Barker (Emma Messenger) who was killed in an FBI shootout in 1935. She has a great deal of affection for Red but doesn’t agree with his lifestyle and doesn’t like the woman he married. She warns him that the only women men can ever trust are their Mothers. But her love of her sons seems wrapped around what they can do for her without consideration of what it is doing to them. He finally has a cookie and heads for home to confront his angry wife. It is there that he meets his maker as we hear three gunshots after he enters the house. A final scene memorializes Red for all of us as we have become his last friends.
It’s a thoughtful piece about the decisions that people make that can impact the rest of their lives. By virtue of Jason Maxwell’s considered understated performance as Red, we have all grown to know him as a good man. Even his last act, as he squares his shoulders to face his wife and talk her down from her craziness, is an act of hope and kindness. He just wasn’t successful, and she ended up in a mental asylum. Everyone else along the way also contributed to our picture of Red as honorable. John Hauser was a very persuasive younger brother but Red turned away without turning his back on his brother. Don Randle as Red’s cellmate put up a good facade of accepting his life sentence but his anxious body language gave him away. The scene between Red and the lovely young Japanese girl beautifully illustrated how he had moved into kindness as a way of life despite his position as a guard to people who had done nothing to be locked up. She had found a way to make their prison tolerable and shared it with him. Even his conversation with his mother as she washed socks and “other” items allowed him to stand up to her demands and make his own way out the door. Neuman’s vignettes from Red’s life were well conceived to illustrate his journey from kinda good to much better in a realistic way.
By day, it’s a lovely park to stroll through. With the understated lighting by Zoe Gidiere and the live music provided by Nika Garcia as our ghostly guide, it turns into a different setting altogether. When you go, be sure to take a jacket and flat shoes; part of the path is not paved. The nights are getting chilly and you are outside most of the time.
A WOW factor of 8.25!!